Jimmy, I love that first picture. A great head shot plus lots of other interesting things about the snake.

I think this strand raises a good question, or several..."What do we consider an Emory's rat?" Also, "Who is working with Emory's rats at this time, and which ones?"

In the old days we used to consider anything not a corn snake to be an Emory's rat, or Great Plains ratsnake. Today we have the northern plains ratsnakes, emoryi, the southern plains ratsnakes, or thornscrub rats as I like to call them, meahllmorum, Slowinski's corn, slowinskii, and the western plains ratsnakes, intermontana. There's also all kinds of local variations and intergrades.

Recently I have heard of several people finding Slowinski's corns in se. Oklahoma. We used to call anything west of the Mississippi a GPR. This snake is closer to a corn snake than a GPR, but I'm sure some of our so-called hybrids are from crosses with this stock. The Texas corn, slowinskii, was also considered to be an Emory for a long time. Venturing further south, we have the meahllmorum, which we're finding to be quite variable and different from Emory, which have also been considered to be Emory's rats in the past. Then there's the intermontana, and so on.

Now I'm thinking of all those creamsicles and cinnamons out there in the hobby and wondering what kind of genes do they really have? Obviously they're not pure corns, but how many are also not even Emory's rats? I think we're going to see some folks specializing in "western corns", that is GPR's, plus intermontanas, meahllmorums, etc, in the future, and crossing with corns to make special crosses, or locality crosses, etc. In other words, your creamsicle might be very different from my creamsicle. We might even come up with some forms that we can change the name on because they are so different from normal creams, etc.

Just some wanderings and thoughts on Emory's rats. My apologies to the corn snake folks, who consider it to be a stand alone species, whereas I see them as mearly a subspecies in the corn snake group.

Cheers...TC
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